New Court Filing Takes Issue With Ramapo Assembly Districts

The town of Ramapo is at the center of a new filing in a federal lawsuit over New York’s redistricting process, with a town councilman alleging that the state’s new Assembly districts separate the town’s Hasidic Jewish communities and like-minded villages.

Councilman Yitzchok Ullman filed an intervenor complaint in a previous lawsuit requesting court intervention in redistricting, saying that the split Ramapo districts violate the “one person, one vote” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by separating the Hasidic populations in the villages of New Square and Kaser.

“Under these circumstances it seems likely that absent judicial intervention in theredistricting process, the Town of Ramapo will be impermissibly divided intomultiple assembly districts, and further that Plaintiff Intervenor will reside within anassembly district whose boundaries have been impermissibly drawn based uponreligious considerations,” according to the filing.

Ramapo is currently split among three Assembly districts, though New Square and Kaser are represented by Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee, D-Suffern, Rockland County. The new maps, seen in the picture above, would take effect in 2013.

Ullman requests that the court redraw New York’s Assembly districts. So far, the court has stayed out of the state-level redistricting process after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a set of lawmaker-drawn maps earlier this month.